Economists reinforce this concern, and Lattimore’s arguments. They inform us that the targets of U.S. aggression do not grow weaker. The gross national products of those most exploited by Western imperialism, the Have-Not nations, has grown faster than any other economic sector. Have-Nots demonstrate more and more resilience, imagination and adaptive skill in coping with imperial Haves. For decades ranking members of our own State Department and intelligence community have acknowledged Arabic peoples to be highly adept modernizers even as the public is encouraged to view Arabs as backward, religious fanatics. The Islamic Fundamentalist Movement shows remarkable ability at managing finances electronically, at creating effective combatant units operating like tiny islands connected only to a central command post, and at presenting well armed and powerful nations with an efficient enemy difficult if not impossible to eliminate. Like deadly hornets, they fly too fast to be swatted and deliver lethal stings repeatedly.
History tells us that the world of warfare has always changed. In today's world, conventional warfare seems passé. Wars are no longer waged between armies and navies and air forces, so much as between the former as Imperial forces and small groups of very sophisticated guerilla fighters as their opponents. No guerilla band can defeat any nation’s army or police force, but no nation’s army or police force can protect its own citizenry from being ravaged by guerillas. The tiniest, most backward village has access to the Internet, affording people detailed information about how to obtain and use biological and chemical weapons. When "little people" willing to die to deliver such weapons are managed and orchestrated by sophisticated organizations operating as easily from London, Calcutta, Buenos Aires or Los Angeles as from a foxhole in Afghanistan, then attacks by "little people" seem likely to achieve a high degree of success. Powerful nation-states possess vastly superior arms, but the inferior weapons of the scattered guerilla forces who oppose them can surely deliver socially devastating havoc.
An outcome of modernization predictable for nearly a century has apparently materialized: No matter how well-armed one nation or confederation, international conflict promises to be a lose-lose proposition. In the twenty-first century any population's survival may well depend upon the survival of all. The failure of current U.S. policy makers to discuss, much less indicate awareness of these concerns must generate more than loud arguments about their intentions. It must generate an intensive evaluation of their very ability to operate rationally.
3 Real humanitarianism requires accepting real human nature
If the foregoing evidence and arguments have merit, then the absence of debate concerning whether our nation's leaders can successfully achieve aggressive, Machiavellian goals should be cause for alarm. Whether or not U.S. citizens deplore leaders’ undisguised readiness to conquer, torture and enslave when "necessary" is indeed a crucial question, but it is not the same question. Passionately deploring the violence of leaders who can presumably keep one safe is not the same as vigorously rejecting leaders who can clearly not keep one safe. At this stage of our cultural evolution, U.S. citizens are still unlikely to challenge their leaders for being ruthless, but might well do so if they perceive them to be irrational and inept. Therefore, it is crucial to ask if our leaders can, with a reasonable degree of certainty, annihilate masses of poor Africans and Asians, and kill and oppress "expendable" Americans as well, with impunity?
It requires little imagination to envision devastating attacks upon random schools, small towns, church picnics and crowded streets, changing the United States into a place of fear, depression and outrage at leaders who add to our torment in order to preserve their control. This is what U.S. citizens can rationally anticipate if we fail accurately to assess the rationality, if not indeed the sanity, of our leaders. These include not merely the Incumbency, but the more elusive, shadowy group who no longer earn but simply own money. The men who sit on the boards of major corporations, who manage the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who fund the great Neo-liberal/ Neo-conservative think tanks, and who decide which candidates citizens will be allowed to select amongst. Even as our government proclaims that only they can protect us from ethno-centric enemies bent upon our destruction, history firmly rejects this argument. In-groups have defined themselves based upon ethnicity, religion and ideology, but wars have been waged when people thought they could win them, or when their backs were so far to the wall they found death preferable to the life they faced. Only the insane pursue warfare likely to produce only chaos. Until this point, somehow sanity has managed to prevail in a world torn by warfare for what hopefully will turn out to be a brief period of human history.
Evidence that our government bears a rich tradition of subjugation, enslavement and the extermination of inconvenient and easily disposed of out-groupers is abundant. Evidence that those we subjugate constitute threats to our way of life is scarce. Contrary to the propaganda citizens receive, the State Department’s own chief advisors since the 1950s have characterized Arabs in particular as people eager to join us at our table of prosperity, not to replace us. They need our expertise and hope we need their labor. They seem motivated not by hatred of our lifestyle, but by optimism that they too can attain the skills of production and marketing and planning that we have achieved. Their history indicates that they are, however, as capable as we of ruthlessness, and are no less strategically adaptive. Having not occupied the seat of power for centuries, they may be less corrupt and less insane than we. If we will not accept them, they will surely do all possible to change our minds.
5 Where to begin
Education for sanity might begin with this lesson: that social conflict is not an inevitable product of human nature. Growing evidence affirms that human conflict has more to do with social context than with genes or personality or primitive instincts and drives.
The second lesson, perhaps, might be that ethics and morality, our commitment to decency, constitute the most practical political basis for our continued existence. Extending the concept of in-group to include all humans, and then all beings, would seem to be a necessary, and perhaps even sufficient step toward saving the world Presumably, we are wise enough, probably, to grasp and act upon these facts. Should we, on the other hand, allow power-corrupted leaders, people who seem truly ill by any reasonable definition of the term, to nullify our collective wisdom, our suicide seems predictable and puzzling. It would amount to a profound and strange reversal of the adaptive driving forces of natural selection.
The third lesson might describe how change could occur. As people grasp essential facts and patterns, some of which have only come into sharp relief during the past few decades, there will surely be tipping points and groundswells and upheavals, and a new renaissance of social organization. This might include revamping high school history courses, creating people's media, and forming "churches" that deplore addictive religion. It also might mean selecting political candidates compelled to deal in truth whomever this might discomfit. It might mean offering people currently choosing the false safety of fascism, a real choice.
If addressing the question of aggression’s feasibility seems cold blooded it also seems the most rational way out of the trap of endless in-group vs out-group aggression. Because we are not innately compelled to act humanely toward “others,” we must elect to do so based upon evidence of its survival value. Because we possess the capacity to assimilate such evidence rationally, and then to integrate it emotionally, we should be able to achieve the level of moral and ethical behavior that we envision but cannot yet fully embrace. The true function of education is to ensure this logical/emotional process by enabling us to gather and analyze evidence pertaining to the question of whether warfare can any longer guarantee the survival of anyone.
This is hardly an abstract issue. People are desperately trying to come to terms with current events in Iraq. Is it a deplorable but necessary venture? Is it ruthless and inhumane? The reasoning presented here indicates that it is profoundly irrational.
SELECTED REFERENCES (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Besteman, Catherine and Hugh Gusterson (eds.). Why America's Top
Pundits are Wrong: anthropologists talk back. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005.
Bibby, Geoffrey, Four Thousand Years Ago : a panorama of life in the
second millennium B.C. New York: Knopf, 1962.
